Fall 2008 over.

Final credits coming up next...

We're Moving!

THIS BLOG IS MOVING TO:

http://wilkinism.wordpress.com


In other news, for Spring 2008 I'll be teaching two sections of COMP I and two sections of COMP II

See ya then.

How Composition Crumbles

Blow-out-snow-out-end-of-semester-a-thon 2007.

Beloved classes of Tuesday and Thursday fame had their last class meeting ROBBED from them. The shame! No sense of closure? No sense of completion? It remains to be known.

All I know is that there sure are a TON of papers to grade. The snowed-in feeling lends well to this, assuring I have very little to look forward to outside, unless I'm wearing 4000 layers of clothes.

Real Life Business things:
-If you didn't get to do your oral presentation because of class cancellation, send me some body of work in place of your presentation. It should be the equivalent to a two-page, double spaced paper. You might send me:

a. Your Power Point presentation
b. Other presentation materials that are possible to email
c. A two-page double spaced description of your research process and what you learned during this research paper


-Grades should be finished by some point (probably late) on Tuesday; email me if you'd like to find out your grade around that time

-I will find out what the possibility is of returning final papers to you ASAP; anything that might be returned to you would have to either be next semester, or, I think I will be on campus this THURSDAY

-I am very fond of you, and if you need anything like a LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION for things out there in life, come see me.

-This is all the real business I can deal with right now.

Two eggs, two songs

I'm not vegan, so this morning I ate two eggs, a half of avocado, toast, and cream cheese. I also had some bold coffee with nutmeg in it. Then I read some good ol' JJ Rousseau because it is the most expensive book I ever bought (25 dollars).

I wrote two songs this morning and recorded brief sketches of them so I don't forget them.

Articulating thoughts on paper is hard and so is articulating thoughts in music. Arranging paragraphs is the same as arranging chords, tonal ornamentation, and rhythm. The shapes, colors, and structures of essays are translatable to sound. I want Peter Elbow to come into our classrooms and do 30 second vocal impressions of our essays. Maybe someone should do a 7 minute non-language vocal interpretation of their research paper for their oral presentation.

In other composition news, yesterday, my friend Melle challenged me to write a personal manifesto and mail it to her by the end of the day. I failed. Hopefully I'll do it today.

See you in class in 5 minutes.

Emergency

A friend's apartment just burned down. It's so impersonal to even write into a tiny box on the Internet. A friend's apartment just burned down. Things burn down. Stuff burns. It burns and then it is gone. And it just happens. And it happens early in a morning.

My two friends who lived on the second floor of an Albany apartment weren't hurt, but the apartment that apparently started the fire, well, one of people who lived there had to be rescued by fire fighters and was severely burned.

Unimaginable. And then you are liberated from your stuff. Don't have to move those books again. Don't have to move the couch. The shelves and the papers; and holy shit imagine all the pictures, journals, drawings, secret notes, spells, recipes, food, and, well it is all gone, because the third floor collapsed onto the second floor. And if you don't wake up I don't even want to think about it or write about it, right now, here.

Tuesday Morning Is New Each Moment

I am about to book a flight to Seattle for Winter break. I've never been to the West Coast, and I'll be arriving just after New Year's Day, so it will be a grand beginning for 2K8!

I can almost count the number of people I know who have fled to Seattle on two hands now. At first I thought I was going to visit, like, TWO people, and now I realize that there are about 11. And, I'll have to re-calculate, but I am pretty sure they are all 11 people that I actually WANT to see.

While in Seattle hopefully I'll record some music with my friend Josh, an NYC polymath transplanted to the West. Josh and I were part of a musical project once-upon-a-time called Todd Is New Each Moment. Josh came to Albany for a weekend and we, and one other person, locked ourselves inside for a summer weekend and recorded two TINEM albums, ("Deepthroat" and "Go Blondie! I Have Always Loved You!"), and a short film chronicling the whole experience was captured.

TINEM was a ton of fun for me because the process of song writing was so quick there was hardly any time for deliberation--it is like when someone is interviewing you about your papers and writing down everything you say, you are less likely to commit self-censorship.

Oh Todd!

The end is near!

Good morning!

The hourglass is nearly spent. The bags under the eyes look like November blust. Papers will be turned in and then everyone will go on their merry way.

Writing, text wrestling, wordage, paragraph splicing, title philandering, meaning oniomania, and how often do I need to sharpen my pencils?

Well, the bus is near, but you'll hear again from me soon!


Caffeine and rough drafts,
Wilk.